The Problem-Solution Pattern in Apprentice vs. Professional Technical Writing: An Application of Appraisal Theory

e problem-solution pattern in apprentice vs.
professional technical writing 125
The problem-solution pattern in apprentice

vs. professional technical writing:
an application of appraisal theory
Lynne Flowerdew
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, PR China
This article reports a corpus-based analysis of the Problem-Solution pattern

in an apprentice and in a professional corpus of technical recommenda-
tion-type reports. The first part of the article describes how salient lexis for
the Problem-Solution pattern has been identified using the Keywords Tool
(Scott 1997), which uncovers words of unusually high frequency in a corpus
when compared with a larger-scale reference corpus. The second part of the
article describes the classification of the keywords, which is based on Mar-
tin’s system of APPRAISAL for encoding evaluative lexis. The importance
of taking into account the “context of situation” and “context of culture” for
Copyright © 2004. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
the interpretation of the evaluative keyword lexis is also highlighted.
1. Introduction
A few years ago (L. Flowerdew 1998), I advocated the application of corpus
linguistic techniques to textlinguistics in the areas of discourse analysis, genre
analysis and systemic-functional linguistics. In L. Flowerdew (2002) I noted
that recently quite a lot of corpus-based research of on EAP has been carried
out from a systemic-functional linguistic, SFL, perspective (Halliday 1994).
Most of these studies are of a contrastive nature in which various aspects
of student writing are compared with expert, or professional writing. For
example, research on the interpersonal level, which shows the writer’s attitude
towards a proposition, can be found in Hyland and Milton (1997) and Hew-
ings and Hewings (2002). ematic structure, “the point of departure of the
message”, has been investigated by Green et al. (2000), while Ragan (2001) has
analysed topical themes in an annotated learner corpus.
Corpora and Language Learners, edited by Guy Aston, et al., John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=622381.
Created from uql on 2019-04-09 16:03:47.
126 Lynne Flowerdew
One aspect of Halliday’s system, which has been developed over the past few
years by Jim Martin, is APPRAISAL. e APPRAISAL framework is related
to the Interpersonal level and specifically concerns the way language is used
to evaluate and to manage interpersonal positionings. is framework has
mainly been applied to the analysis of media discourse, casual conversation
and literature (see White (2001) for an overview of these research studies),
but not to the analysis of student or apprentice discourse, as has been the case
with other aspects of SFL theory mentioned above. e research reported on
in this paper is therefore an attempt to apply the APPRAISAL framework to an
analysis of student and professional writing, specifically technically-oriented
reports. is genre very oen follows a Problem-Solution organizational pat-
tern (Swales 1990), detailed descriptions of which can be found in Hoey (1983;
2001). However, with the exception of Scott’s (2000) research, this discourse
pattern has not received nearly as much attention in corpus-based research as
other textlinguistic areas have. A corpus-based analysis of the Problem-Solu-
tion pattern situated within the APPRAISAL framework would help to shed
light on how this important pattern is realised linguistically in student and
professional report writing.
e following section describes the student corpus, the professional corpus
and the methodological procedures employed in the investigation. is is fol-
lowed by a description of the APPRAISAL framework which is used for clas-

sifying the corpus data.
2. Corpora and methodology
2.1 Description of the corpora
e student (STUCORP) and professional (PROFCORP) corpus consist of

approximately 250,000 words each, with STUCORP and PROFCORP made
up of 80 and 60 reports, respectively. e PROFCORP reports, commissioned
by the Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department from various con-
sultancy companies in Hong Kong, document the potential environmental
impact that could arise from the construction and operation of proposed
buildings and facilities. ese reports also contain a section on suggested miti-
gation measures to alleviate any possible adverse impacts.
e STUCORP reports are written by 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate stu-
e problem-solution pattern in apprentice vs. professional technical writing 127
dents at a tertiary institution in Hong Kong as assessed assignments on a Tech-

nical Communications Skills course. Brief assignment guidelines are given to
students which stipulate that they are expected to choose an area for investiga-
tion where a problem or need can be identified on the basis of evidence from
secondary and primary source data (survey questionnaire, interview, observa-
tion), and propose a set of recommendations to solve or alleviate an identified
problem. e topics of the STUCORP reports are quite wide ranging and
mostly concern different university departmental or service unit issues, such as
an evaluation of the existing soware or hardware in computer rooms, or the
lack of security measures in the laboratories. Unlike the PROFCORP reports,
however, the STUCORP reports are unsolicited in that the students write the
reports on the basis of a problem perceived by them rather than in response to a
request by a department to investigate an issue. For this reason, the STUCORP
reports can be regarded as more “problem-oriented” than the PROFCORP
ones, as students have to provide persuasive evidence for the existence of some
problem or need and not merely give a problem statement.
2.2 Methodological procedures: Keyword and key-key word analyses
In order to uncover the lexis for the Problem-Solution pattern in each corpus,
I decided that the Keyword function in WordSmith Tools would be suitable for
this purpose as this tool identifies linguistic items which are of unusually high
frequency in a particular corpus when compared with a larger-scale reference
corpus. Previously, this tool has been used for delineating particular genres on
the basis of the keywords (Bondi 2001; Scott 1997; Tribble 2002), but it could
equally be applied to uncovering key lexis for the Problem-Solution pattern.
e identification of salient lexis was carried out in two stages: a keyword,
and a “key-key word” analysis. First, each corpus was treated as a single text
and compared with a large reference corpus, in this case the BNC (Aston and
Burnard 1998) for extraction of the keywords. e first stage of the analysis
involved examining the keywords to determine whether any of these would
signal the Problem-Solution pattern in PROFCORP or STUCORP. First, each
corpus, which was treated as a whole text, was compared with the BNC, the
reference corpus. e Log Likelihood for calculating the significance level was
set at a p value which would obtain about 40 keywords for the analysis, as Scott
(1997) suggests this as a reasonable number for drawing conclusions about a
text, and the minimum frequency requirement was le at the default value of
128 Lynne Flowerdew
3. In the second stage, a “key-key word” analysis was conducted, which shows
the words that are key in a large number of texts of a given type, and can thus
reflect the genre or discourse characteristics of the corpus as a whole. It was
thought that a combination of these two related procedures would provide
ample evidence for the linguistic items signalling the Problem and Solution
elements of the pattern.
As both the main elements of the Problem-Solution pattern are essentially
evaluative in nature, it was decided that Martin’s system of APPRAISAL,
which is set within the SFL tradition, would provide an ideal framework for
classifying the keywords and key-key words. A description of the APPRAISAL
framework is given below, with particular attention to those aspects of the
framework which are relevant to the investigation reported in this paper.
3. APPRAISAL framework and classification of keywords
An excellent overview of the APPRAISAL system can be found on Peter

White’s site (http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal/). In short, there are three
subtypes of Appraisal: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. It is the Attitude
subtype “Values by which speakers pass judgments and associate emotional/
affectual responses with participants and processes” (White 1998/99) which I

make use of in this research, specifically the aspect of judgement. Judgement
may be activated by either explicit or implicit means, referred to by Martin
as strategies involving “Inscribe” and “Evoke” (see Figure 1 below). In other
work, Martin refers to these evaluative categories as “Inscribed” and “Evoked”
Figure 1. Strategies for encoding attitude – inscribe, invite, provoke (from Martin 2004:
289)
(Martin 2000). In this paper, I shall retain the term “Inscribed” as it best con-
veys the meaning of what attitude is inherent in a word. However, following
Hoey (2001) I shall adopt the term “Evoking” in preference to “evoke” and
“evoked” as the form “Evoking” best reflects the idea that a word evokes some
kind of reaction in the reader.
3.1 Inscribed vs. Evoking items
e Inscribed option realises lexis which is explicitly evaluative. With regard to

the Problem element, this would include such nouns as problem, fault, draw-
back, where the evaluation is built into the word, as it were. ese tend to be
superordinate terms and a type of discourse-organising noun, which overlap
with what Winter (1977) terms Vocabulary 3 items, Francis (1986 and 1994)
A-Nouns (anaphoric nouns), Ivanič (1991) “carrier” nouns and Schmid (2000)
“shell” nouns. Carter (1992:80) also recognises this evaluative quality inherent
in such nouns: “An interesting category of A-nouns are those which generally
signal attitudes. Such items do more than merely label the preceding discourse.
ey mark it in an interpersonally sensitive way revealing the writer’s positive
or negative evaluation of the antecedent proposition”. Here, Carter touches
upon an important distinction between Inscribed and Evoking lexis regard-
ing the reader/writer orientation towards the text, as also pointed out in Hoey
(2001:126): “e writer inscribes the evaluation; on the other hand, it is the
word that evokes (or provokes) an evaluation in the reader”.
e Evoking option “draws on ideational meaning to “connote” evaluation,
either by selecting meanings which invite a reaction or deploying imagery to
provoke a stance” (Martin 2004:289). In this model, it is the “invite” option of
the Evoking category I am interested in, where the item, taken out of context,
would evoke an evaluative response in the reader. For example, items signal-
ling the Problem element such as cancer and pollution would belong to this
category. White (2001) notes that while the Evoking option is likely to lead to
some inference of good/bad, it still remains a purely “factual” description. is
implies that yet another option would seem to exist for the Evoking category
where it would only be possible to tell from the context whether an item evokes
a positive or negative semantic prosody (see Hunston and ompson 2000 for
a discussion of the role of context in bringing out this element of evaluation).
In fact, Inscribed and Evoking lexis can also be viewed as aspects of connota-
tion. In his discussion on connotation, Partington (2001) mentions that where
130 Lynne Flowerdew
connotation is so intrinsic to a word it is taken for granted, i.e. writer-initiated,

and where the connotation seems less intrinsic it can be based on situational or
cultural factors. In Partington’s definitions, the former would seem to relate to
Inscribed and the latter to Evoking lexis.
Below, I present the analysis of the keywords and key-key words within the
APPRAISAL framework of Inscribed and Evoking items described above.
4. Results and discussion
4.1 Keyword analysis
First, an examination of the top 40 key words in each corpus was carried out
to determine which of these signalled either Inscribed or Evoking lexis for the
Problem-Solution pattern. e Inscribed lexis was identified on the basis of
whether the word had an intrinsically negative (e.g. problem) or positive (e.g.
solution) connotation. Evoking lexis was largely identified through whether a
negative or positive connotation (such as noise and waste for the Problem ele-
ment) could be inferred by a reader. However, in some cases it was necessary
to examine the lexis in the wider context to determine whether a word did,
in fact, carry any negative or positive connotation relating to the Problem or
Solution element.
e keyword analysis revealed that lexical items were overwhelmingly used
for the Problem-Solution pattern. ere were no examples of grammatical
words such as but or however, which could be acting as signals for the Problem
element. Interestingly, in STUCORP, there was only one Inscribed signal, i.e.
problem, whereas in PROFCORP 15 out of the 40 keywords can be classified
as belonging to one of the categories of the pattern. e Evoking items, noise,
impacts, impact, waste, traffic, dust, realise the Problem element, with construc-
tion, landfill and reclamation having the potential to be either the Problem or
Solution element depending on the context. In contrast, the Solution element
is signalled by keywords of an Inscribed nature, e.g. mitigation, measures, pro-
posed, recommended, with monitoring and assessment used for the Evaluation
element. Although at first sight, PROFCORP seems to exhibit a more overt
Problem-Solution pattern than STUCORP, this is not to say that the reports
in STUCORP are not problem-oriented, for reasons given below in the discus-
sion on the key-key word analysis.
Table 1. Comparison of Inscribed and Evoking signals for the Problem element in
PROFCORP and STUCORP.
INSCRIBED
STUCORP PROFCORP
problem (8)
problems (4)
need (4)
insufficient (5)
EVOKING
STUCORP PROFCORP
stolen (4) impacts (50) impact (26)

noise (44) traffic (23) sewage (12) sewerage (6)
contaminated (14) contamination (4)
waste (20) wastes (5) dust (20)
pollution (10) emissions (10) sediments (10) odour (9)
effluent (6) discharge (5) discharges (5)
NSRS (9) Dba (8) TSP (7)

Leachate (6) stormwater (5) groundwater (4)
* construction (47) landfill (10)
Note: * indicates lexis which can signal either the Problem or Solution element.
Italics indicates vocabulary of a technical nature.
4.2 Key-key word analysis
Tables 1 and 2 present the key-key words, i.e. those keywords which are key in
a large number of texts, for the Problem and Solution element of each corpus.
(e figure in brackets denotes the number of texts in which the words are
found to be key). I have listed only those items which were found to be key
in four or more reports for the reason that those keywords which were key in
three or fewer reports tended to be the names of environmental companies in
PROFCORP or university departments in STUCORP. On the other hand, as
can be seen from Tables 1 and 2, the most frequent key-key words are those
denoting the Problem-Solution pattern, which can thus be considered as
reflecting the textual patterning of each corpus as a whole.
132 Lynne Flowerdew
While the tables provide clear evidence that both corpora comprise Prob-
lem-Solution based reports, the overall profiles of the patterning are somewhat
different. e key-key word analysis for the PROFCORP reports mirrors to
a large extent the patterning uncovered by the keyword analysis in that the
Problem element tends to favour Evoking lexis while the Solution element
prefers the Inscribed lexis. It is also to be noted that some of this evaluative
lexis is key in a very large number of reports, which is not surprising given that
the PROFCORP reports are relatively homogeneous in terms of subject mat-
ter and we would therefore expect this to be the case. ere are two Evoking
items in the data, construction and landfill, which can fill either the Problem or
Solution slot. Whether these evoke a positive or negative reaction in the reader
can only be determined by the context. For example, in some reports landfill
is conceived as a problem causing leachate seepage; in other reports, construc-
tion of a landfill is seen as a solution for the disposal of waste material.
In contrast, it is the Inscribed lexis which dominates the signalling of the
Problem-Solution pattern in STUCORP. e heavy reliance on superordi-
nate terms such as problem and recommendations can be traced back to the
rubrics for the assignment which include all these Inscribed key-key words
in the instructions. It therefore appears that students are incorporating the
metalanguage provided in the assignment guidelines into the writing of their
recommendation reports to overtly signal the pattern. Moreover, it is also to be

expected that there would be far fewer lexical items occurring as key-key words
across a large number of reports in STUCORP. As the topics of the student
reports cover a much wider subject range than those in PROFCORP, the same
lexis would tend not to occur across reports and therefore would not show up
as key in four or more of the reports. is explains why other key lexis for the
Problem-Solution pattern is present in STUCORP, but only occurs as key in
three or less of the reports. However most of this lexis is Inscribed and related
to the Problem aspect, either nominal, e.g. concern, failures, difficulties, short-
coming, issue, or adjectival, where the negative import of the word is signalled
by the prefix in- or un-, e.g. inadequate, inefficient, thus indicating that the
student reports are weighted towards the Problem element. is is not surpris-
ing as the teaching materials put emphasis on the identification of a problem
through evidence from primary and secondary source data. e absence of
any Evoking technical vocabulary in STUCORP can be explained by the fact
that students are instructed to write their reports for a non-specialist audience
(although the subject matter of the reports may be technical), whereas the
PROFCORP reports are addressed to specialists in the field.

e above discussion thus highlights the importance of referring to con-
textual features, such as the report writing guidelines for interpretation of the
keywords and key-key words in corpus-based analyses (see Lea and Street 1999
who advocate a socio-cognitive approach to the analysis of different kinds of
texts concerning the writing process, such as “guidelines for dissertation writ-
ing”). It also demonstrates that what initially appears as a paucity of Inscribed
and Evoking signals in STUCORP, and thus a deficiency in students’ writing,
may not in fact be the case when contextual and situational factors are taken
into account, an aspect which Tognini-Bonelli (2001) regards as important in
analysis of corpus data.
5. Concluding remarks
is paper has shown the potential value of exploiting the APPRAISAL system
for coding keyword lexis for the Problem-Solution pattern into Inscribed and
Evoking items. I have also made the point that to fully interpret this evalua-
tive lexis, especially the Evoking items, it is necessary to have recourse to the
“context of situation’, a dimension of language which is inherent in an SFL
approach to text analysis. is framework also provides a good starting point
from which to examine the lexico-grammatical patterning of the key-key
words discussed in this article, which is presented in Flowerdew (2003). Now
that corpus studies and SFL are becoming more closely aligned, it is expected
that other subdomains of the APPRAISAL system will be exploited in future
corpus-based research.
References
Aston, G. and Burnard, L. 1998. The BNC Handbook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Bondi, M. 2001. “Small corpora and language variation: Reflexivity across genres”. In M.
Ghadessy et al. (eds), 135–174.
Carter, R. 1992. Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Flowerdew, J. (ed) 2002. Academic Discourse. London: Longman.
Flowerdew, L. 1998. “Corpus linguistic techniques applied to textlinguistics”. System, 26
(4):541–52.

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e problem-solution pattern in apprentice vs.

professional technical writing 125

The problem-solution pattern in apprentice

This article reports a corpus-based analysis of the Problem-Solution pattern

the interpretation of the evaluative keyword lexis is also highlighted.

lowed by a description of the APPRAISAL framework which is used for clas-

2. Corpora and methodology

2.1 Description of the corpora

e student (STUCORP) and professional (PROFCORP) corpus consist of

dents at a tertiary institution in Hong Kong as assessed assignments on a Tech-

2.2 Methodological procedures: Keyword and key-key word analyses

3. APPRAISAL framework and classification of keywords

An excellent overview of the APPRAISAL system can be found on Peter

affectual responses with participants and processes” (White 1998/99) which I

3.1 Inscribed vs. Evoking items

e Inscribed option realises lexis which is explicitly evaluative. With regard to

connotation is so intrinsic to a word it is taken for granted, i.e. writer-initiated,

4. Results and discussion

4.1 Keyword analysis

stolen (4) impacts (50) impact (26)

NSRS (9) Dba (8) TSP (7)

* construction (47) landfill (10)

4.2 Key-key word analysis

recommendation reports to overtly signal the pattern. Moreover, it is also to be

PROFCORP reports are addressed to specialists in the field.

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